Over 2,500 acres of State-owned land controlled or managed by the Department of Agriculture has ‘probably’ not been looked at by the Department in 50 years.

As a legacy of the Land Commission, the Department owns a number of small plots of land, principally forestry or bog — a total of 1,050 hectares, according to the 2020 Appropriation Account.

Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee recently, secretary-general Brendan Gleeson said his Department

does not have valuations for the lands because its policy is to value things at the point of disposal.

“Some of the sites are former Land Commission sites and some of them are bits of land on top of mountains,” he said.

“We are looking at our forestry plots to see if it is worthwhile transferring them to Coillte. Most of them, I would suggest, have very little value. They are not fit for agriculture.”

Mr Gleeson said it was “definitely true” that the Department has probably not looked at some of its plots for 50 years and does not know what is happening on them.

The Department also owns other lands, including those on which its laboratories are located, the potato testing centre in Raphoe, and Haulbowline Island, on which the Naval Headquarters is located, and which is in the process of being transferred to the Department of Defence.

Taken together with the Land Commission non-agricultural lands, the Department’s land holdings total 1,564ha (6,335ac).

Separately, the Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalouge signalled his Department’s first steps to provide more access to the records of the Land Commission.

 

Digitising

Responding to a question on the issue, he said the Department is examining the possibility of digitising certain key search aids, enabling electronic searches to be carried out by members of the public to ascertain if specific records exist. He said the work is at an early stage.

Despite the Irish Land Commission ceasing to function in 1992, the Minister said his Department is charged with completing its work, and the records of the Commission are “still working documents, accessed by my staff daily”.